No Greater Love

 

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." - John 15:13, KJV

In the final moments before Jesus was crucified, we find Him teaching his disciples a few last things.  As might be expected, He teaches them about love.  Love in this case means sacrifice.  It means the ultimate sacrifice.

This is a stark contrast to the love that the world promotes.  We are told that love is just a feeling, "The heart wants what the heart wants."  This is love centered on desire.  If the desire is no longer there, then love is no longer there and it is time to move on.  This is a mundane, profane sort of love that centers on self-satisfaction and self-gratification.  This love is so different from the love Christ taught it is almost unrecognizable.  It is like comparing an egg to the moon or an ant to an eagle in flight.  

We hear, "You can't choose who you love."  As though love is some involuntary response.  Like it is a knee-jerk reaction.  Thank goodness most parents don't operate this way with their children.  I have a two-year-old niece and I assure you there are plenty of times when she is pitching a fit and being difficult that there is not much desire or strong feeling in my sister's heart for her daughter.  There may be strong feelings, but they are probably not love.  In those moments parents purposefully choose to love their children.  This love surpasses emotion and feelings and is closer to the love Jesus is speaking of.

The "greater love" Jesus describes here is a love that always finds its greatest joy in the joy of another.  It is a love that seeks to satisfy the needs of others ahead of itself.

A few verses earlier in John 15 (v. 11), Jesus said this, "These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." 

I am in pursuit of this joy.  The name of this blog, "Desperate Joy" is an attempt to describe my desire for this joy.

Jesus says that if we want to find this fullness of joy, we must do so through sacrificial love, through laying down our lives for our friends.

We get this backwards.  We want to have friends, girlfriends and boyfriends, and we expect them to fill us with joy.  Jesus says it should be the opposite.  We find friends, pour into them, sacrifice our lives for them, and then we find joy.  This joy is a gift of God that He pours into our hearts through the conduit of love.  We love God, then we go and love others and God fills us with joy.  He gives us fullness of joy.  Joy so abundant and radiant our hearts can't contain it.  But this only happens when we lay down our lives.

Our natural intuition tells us that if we are going to be happy, we have to accumulate, to grab and hold on to things.  We have to fight for our right to party as the Beastie Boys had it.  Jesus said, "Nope, that's not it, it's the exact opposite."  If we want to gain life, we lay our life down.  If we want to find joy, we have to bring joy to others.  If we want to be happy, we need to be doing everything in our power to make other people happy.  

Christ modeled this perfectly.  He loved us and happily died for us, even when we were in the midst of our sins, "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8, KJV)  We were His enemies, in rebellion against Him, and He still willingly poured out His life's blood to renew us, restore us, and bring us infinite joy.  With His all-seeing eyes, Christ looked into eternity and saw us enjoying heaven with Him forever and ever, and He wanted nothing more than to see us in that happy state, so He went to the Cross and endured hell.  Christ suffered because He wanted us to have unending joy. 

My favorite hymn is "When I Survey" by Isaac Watts and the last stanza says,

"Were the whole realm of nature mine,

That were an offering far too small,

Love, so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all."

We owe everything to Christ, it is only reasonable that  we be willing to sacrifice everything to follow Him.  Most days we can only muster the tiniest fraction of the love that Christ has for us.  We are called to so much more.

We like to think of sacrifice in grand gestures, charging the enemy lines, wrestling the lion, or being crucified, but more often than not, it means little things.  It means preferring others ahead of ourselves.  It means seeking to bring joy into the lives of others, even in the smallest, simplest ways.  It is easy to go to war for Christ, it is not easy to clean a bathroom or mow a lawn for someone else.  More often than not, laying down our life for another means exactly that.

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